Newsmap
Newsmap screenshot
I StumbledUpon newsmap the other day, and it's quite intriguing. Newsmap is "an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator." What does that mean? I don't know. What I do know is that Newsmap allows you to look at news headlines in a completely different way.
As the default Newsmap setup appears, you see U.S. news stories appear in boxes all over your screen. The bigger the box, the bigger the news. The colors of the boxes tell you how old the story is as well as whether it is world/nation/sports/etc.
The Newsmap interface is somewhat customizable, too. At the top, you can add or remove countries. This brings up side-by-side comparisons of each country's news. It's interesting to see how high-ranking U.S. news sometimes falls by the wayside in other countries. You can also remove or add any of the seven news categories. I find that it's much easier to use with one or two categories selected because the headlines tend to get miniscule when so many stories are shown at once.
There are a couple additional features that I do not tend to use at all. In the lower left portion of the interface, you have the ability to look at the archives of Newsmap for up to a week ago. I can't see how this would be particularly entertaining unless you have read every article that comes up for the present time or if you are looking for a news story that was posted five days ago and no longer appears on today's Newsmap. One last feature toggles the view between "Squarified" and "Standard." Oddly enough, Standard is not the default. Go figure.
Now I'll just have to wait for Newsmap 3D.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, July 10th, 2005 at 00:26 by Novac and is filed under All, Computers, Fun, Google, Interesting, Internet, Mainstream Media, Media, Search Engines, Sunday's Site, Technology, Weeklies.
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